In this six-part column, curator and cultural critic james taylor-foster explores spatial and design imaginaries through the lens of the body. Rather than looking at the systems we have constructed to understand the world, these texts explore our own visceral construction to reveal something of how we orient and experience life. This column pauses to consider the unusual relationships between the shapes of ourselves and the designed world.
Limerence is not just an incredibly delightful word. The term, coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the late 1970s, describes a sensation that you may be familiar with: the state of complete, involuntary, attachment to another human.1 This sort of infatuation most often occurs romantically, dissolving soon after it starts. It’s more and more common to hear about the brain cocktail that fuels nascent attraction: dopamine triggered by the chase, oxytocin from touch and trust, serotonin with the pursuit of relationship ‘status’. This is run-of-the-mill stuff, but limerence — although there are degrees of overlap — is more than a crush. It can linger into something more acute — a near-obsessive pining for someone; a longing for reciprocation of said pining; a dependence on being in a state of longing; a deep, bodily buoyancy when reciprocation is given and an unforgiving, chest-filled pain when it seems uncertain; the capacity to rose-tint toxic elements of another into something positive.
Referential drawing by james taylor-foster (2024).
According to my cursory understanding of this complex psycho-emotional condition, it cannot be equated with the ebbs and flows of crushing or loving, nor obsession. It’s somewhere between or outside of these experiences — a glitch in our systems of connection, tainted by our own traumas of self-worth and insecurity. For there to be a person in a state of limerence, there must also be a so-called ‘limerent object’ — the disarmed, disabled subject of intense hope, hunger, and hankering. For the person-in-limerence, their hyper-focused state of attention towards this other is an overwhelming and illogical style of attachment: more of a fictive projection than a grounded reality, even if the object — and the feelings — are essentially true. In the words of marginalista Maria Popova, limerence is “the profound unmooring masquerading as the mooring post.”
The idea of limerence has been normalised because it has poetic power — existential yearning for another human across a room, a street, or an ocean is among the most enduring genres of music, film, and TikTok trends.
I would not want to argue that limerence is an inherently dangerous thing. It may give rise to consequential danger — chief among them the collapse of all other relationships in favour of the so-called one. For those among us who tend to feel intensely, learning about limerence may serve as a reminder that there is, forever, a very fine line. Popular culture ignores fine lines and is, as such, saturated with expressions of limerence. For one: the Love is Blind phenomenon, a reality-show-slash-social-experiment in which total strangers become engaged to marry without physically meeting one another, relies on a diluted form of limerence. The idea of limerence has been normalised because it has poetic power — existential yearning for another human across a room, a street, or an ocean is among the most enduring genres of music, film, and TikTok trends. It’s a genre that spans both psychological horror and romcom with a simultaneous squeal and a sigh.
It teaches that all lines should be dashed or dotted rather than continuous; that the invisible spaces between us are not empty but charged.
The fact that any of us can fall into a state of limerence, or be the object of a limerent other, reveals something about the nebulosity of being human. It teaches that all lines should be dashed or dotted rather than continuous; that the invisible spaces between us are not empty but charged. The cardinal lesson that limerence conceptually offers may be relatively simple: that lucidity is not a given, but a task. To look at another person — even if through the mind’s eye — and see them for who they are is a space in which facts mix with fictions – strangely and sublimely. Longing establishes a vast space that takes vast amounts of energy to conjure but is, at the same time, more intimate and unknowable than anything we can grasp. Acknowledging that empty space is teeming with energy is a sort of clear sight. Space doesn’t have to be inhabited, and sometimes it shouldn’t be.
Bio
james taylor-foster is a writer, cultural critic, and curator of design and digital culture trained in architecture. They are the curator of contemporary architecture and design at ArkDes, and have developed a number of curatorial projects in Stockholm including Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture and Space Popular: Value in the Virtual, alongside public installations with Studio Ossidiana, Swedish Girls, and others. They curated WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD – the first museum exhibition to explore the culture and creative field of ASMR, currently touring. Most recently, they worked with Joar Nango and collaborators to present Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library in the Nordic Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Their first collaborative collection of essays, softspot, was published in 2021 (InOtherWords).
Credits:
Cover image: Martin Simonic (2023)
Notes
1 Tennov articulated limerence in Love and Limerence (1979) as “an uncontrollable, biologically determined, inherently irrational, instinct-like reaction”
